Truth Coffee Roasting

David Donde opened Truth Coffee Roasting in 2012 on Buitenkant Street, having taught himself to roast during an earlier career as a hotelier — he'd supply freshly roasted coffee to weekend guests before turning the hobby into a business. The site he chose was an 1898 Victorian warehouse, stripped back during renovation and rebuilt around a steampunk aesthetic designed by architect Haldane Martin.

Martin's brief drew a direct line between the visual complexity of espresso machines and roasters and the Victorian-futurist fantasy of steampunk design: the finished café is dense with saw-blade tabletops, exposed steel plating, black cabling and overstuffed booths, built to look mechanically ornate rather than minimalist. The roasting equipment itself sits in view, part of the design rather than hidden behind a counter.

The combination — Donde's self-taught roasting background paired with Martin's maximalist industrial design — has made Truth one of Cape Town's most internationally written-about cafés, cited repeatedly in design and coffee press for the same reason: it looks like nowhere else serving coffee.